Thursday, August 21, 2008

The third betas are out!

Last night, Barry released the third and final betas for Python 2.6 and 3.0. This release really saw a monumental effort from everyone. Tuesday was filled with coding, code reviews, and bug fixes, and we were able to close all 10 release blockers. It was looking very bright for a release yesterday morning. (Including the fantastic omen of a green Windows buildbot.) That didn't stop another release blocker from popping up hours before the release. However, we were able to get that one fixed due to some excellent debugging on the parts of Amaury Forgeot d'Arc, Antoine Pitrou, and Victor Stinner. Highlights:

A more completed memoryview implementation. (Once again thanks to Antoine.

I fixed up the symtable module and wrote unittests and docs for it. It should actually be functional now...

The threading API was renamed once again. Now daemon, and name are properties of the Thread object. (That's the last time I'm doing threading renaming I assure you!)

multiprocessing has gotten more stable.

Guido donated the SRE bytecode validator he wrote for the App Engine.

Many, many, many little bug fixes.

Of course, there's still lots of work to do before we can get to release candidates. Hours after the release we already have 11 release blockers. In the mean time, I strongly encourage you to download 2.6 and 3.0 and test them with your project. The bug tracker is still there: http://bugs.python.org